Hacker News Reader

Comment by kebman | Hacker News Reader

Just out of curiosity, how would you delete something off IPFS? Is the only solution to have the address hash point to a program, or app, if at all possible? Or a space that does not update the hash, iven if the "thing" is updated? I'm new to this interplanetary world... :D

View on HN

From IPFS: You don't. As long as a connected node is hosting the file, it will be available to other peers. For a file where a single host is "pinning" a file (= purposfully hosting the file), it will fade out organically once it leaves the caches of all the nodes that accessed it once.

From IPNS: You point the IPNS entry to something nonsensical and then by default it will be gone once the TTL of the old IPNS entry is reached (kind of like DNS).

If you’re the one hosting a file on the network, it’s as easy to delete it as cleaning your cache / stopping hosting it. Folks might have the “address” for your file, but they won’t be able to access it if you aren’t hosting it. Now if someone /else/ has the content already, you can’t take it away from them and delete it off their server - so same model as the web already has (just without central players in control of these decisions, and the useful ability to still find content even if the original host changes)

Not sure you probably store encrypted data and delete decryption key if you want to discard. Now unused blobs will probably fade away with time. Not sure if it works this way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com